Horizon Forbidden West

Nicely done

I will start this soon, I am almost finished with my first run of Elden Ring (almost 180 hours in, at the end now), can I now play the game with nice visuals at 60 or still need to go back to 30 FPS? I saw the game did some updates quite a few times, and did not have time to read all the thread.

 

Don't count on it. They don't mention it at all since patch 1.09 where they mentioned a number of fixes to combat the "shimmering" which included changing TV setting (lol?). One could guess that it will never get fixed for the PS5 version. I'm however wondering what it will look like on PC.

1.09 had a number of changes to fix the "shimmering" but to me the image only got blurrier. I must use Sharpening on my TV otherwise it looks bad. No difference with the lates patch (1.11). 30fps mode still looks best by far.

 

I'm not necessarily opposed to post process sharpening, but only if a few things are true:
1) They're using TAA and/or upscaling or doing something that ends up softening the resulting image -- a mild amount of sharpen can bring the image closer to looking like native and can look pretty good in such cases seems to me (for example DOOM 2016/Eternal use TAA + Sharpen as the game looks very soft with the TSSAA otherwise -- this way you get great aliasing coverage without the image turning to soup).
2) They're using a modern/good sharpen such as AMD CAS Sharpen. Older sharpen algorithms have a lot of issues/visual artifacts (Hardware unboxed talked about this in some of their testing of Nvidia's old solution for example and we can also see how not great older approaches were such as experimenting with the sharpen filter that's on by default in Crysis 3's original PC version).
3) I find a mild/restrained approach to sharpening looks best -- to me the goal should be to bring the image back inline with what a native/raw image would otherwise look like (or close to it), but with the anti-aliasing benefits of TAA (etc) on top of that. For example, the default 50% sharpening for Nvidia's control panel sharpen is just ridiculously oversharpened imo for most games (unless they use especially heavy TAA and are being upscaled at the same time or some such). For games at native a more mild approach like 25% ish looks a lot less bad to me -- oversharpening like they were originally doing with the grass as you say just doesn't look right to me.

 

Yeah, going off what Digital Foundry said on it in their round table call, it doesn't sound like they changed their approach to anti-aliasing at all rather they just tweaked how much post process sharpening they were doing or something in that vein.

Apparently their TAA solution only using 1 prior frame so it's something ilke SMAA 2TX I guess, but with FXAA instead of SMAA and only pulling from 1 prior frame if I understand correctly. Other games pull from more prior frames (DOOM 2016 had an AA mode where they were using up to 8 frames iirc which is kinda nuts when you think about) but I guess this can have its own cons as it softens the image more? Not totally sure there.

In any case I don't think their in-game AA solution is the best and I personally lean more towards wanting better aliasing coverage then if the game looks to soft I can use a modern post process sharpen to bring it closer to native after the fact (AMD CAS Sharpen for example). Instead of just uniformly reducing sharpening they should've provided users with a slider then given a recommended default setting seems to me.

Unrelated, but you know how Nvidia has an FXAA option in their control panel? I wish they would update this given so much time has passed -- it would be nice instead to have a single frame SMAA option instead. ReShade allows this so I see no reason why Nvidia couldn't do it -- would be a big upgrade over the current FXAA control panel option seems to me.

 

Yes, I agree. I also want a 40fps mode like Ratchet & Clank has.

 

Guys I am really trying to play the game, as I loved the first one, but to me this 30 fps more is really worse, feels so sluggish for some reason (not sure why even worse than playing Bloodborne if you can believe that).

I have to add that I had no problems in playing 30 fps games until this one.

Performance mode still looks shyte to my eyes and the shimmering is very present on my 4k display. Why didn't they do some nice checkerboarding like Naughty Dog does in their games?

I am sad to say, but I don't think will finish this one, will give it a few more runs, but.... or wait until maybe it comes to PC at some point.

This will be the first Playstation game (except Bloodborne) that I wished there was a PC version as well.

Cheers.

 

I don't blame you. They have so many options here but don't do anything but add some blur and stuff like that.
¤ 120Hz/40fps mode?
¤ 1440p/60fps or unlocked mode with VRR?

For a first party dev they sure lag behind devs like Insomniac Games who were early with the 120Hz mode.

 

i have and hate these types of games drop 100's if not 1000's of hours in them but at same time probably never finish them cause i just run around doing anything but the main story.


Never play any of KZ game as i never liked FPS games and even more so if they consoles only due to controller aim sucks, so i cant vouch to there quality back then, but ido remeber there " ps3" demo that was speed up to 60fps and look nothing like release of the game which i pretty sure was killzone 2? or was it 3?

 

So I finally had some time to play this and honestly, I'm strongly disappointed...

Especially with combat and changes they've made. What is the most baffling to me are the new artificial limits that make zero sense in this game:

- Overdesigned enemies. Even the "smallest ones" can spam multiple close, range and elemental attacks with extremely erratic behavior and boosted HP.
- Dodge no longer grants "no damage". In HZD, when dodging in right time it was impossible to receive damage. Not anymore.
- Alloy can trigger her own traps now!!! This alone has completely changed the combat... for the worse.
- Stamina? Why would I need some bar to tell me if I can use multiple arrows? In HZD this was not needed and is not needed here either.
- Valor? Why is this even in game? Why do I need some "valor" to enable a device on my wrist or drink a potion?
- Trap limits? Why? What limits Alloy to put a trap on the ground? If I have enough resources I should be able to put as many traps as I want.
- Sharpshooter bows can't use multiple arrow anymore? Why?

All of this feels like some designer had to do some job over the years and had no clue what to add. So he came up with these idiotic bars and limits that don't make any sense here.

I've finished HZD twice. I'm 25 hours in Forbidden West and the sad part is that I would rather play HZD one more time than finish the Forbidden West. Sad.

 

Not sure how they managed it, but the image quality in performance mode has been fixed with the latest patch.

It’s finally looking how it always should have.

 

Yes the temporal stability is much better now, even on PS4Pro, but not without cost.
- The PS4's fan noise was somehow bearable on previous versions of the game and now it is constantly spinning like a jet engine. It's almost at maximum all the time.
- Some vegetation LODs are broken now. It's visible on the crop fields near PlainSong. If you go near the fields with tall crops, you can see very low quality, card-level LODs on the crops. Really ugly stuff.

Anyway, this game needed like 6 months of full dev team effort when it released. No polish at all, ugly game-breaking bugs etc.. Even during my playthrough, mostly on version 1.13, I had to quit and re-load the game 4 maybe 5 times(!) to fix game-breaking progression blockers. There are still texture issues on PS4s, where textures would be stuck at lowest-quality mips for a few seconds even if you are like 1 meter from the mesh. There are terrible delays when you're going to crafting/shopping screen and back and much, much more little bugs and annoyances.

I really don't understand what has happened, but this is a Ubisoft-level of game state. I've never played or seen so unpolished Sony's first party game. I even dare to say that Valhalla has less bugs than this now.

 

A few screenshots of the problem.
Here you can see to broken vegetation LODs:


And even worse case:



--- It should look like this ---

 

Looks fine to me.

 

I hear the final fix performance mode and now its recommended way to play

 

Another interesting update for PS5 owners:


It's nice that they are improving their renderer, but there are so many bugs in this game... even after the 1.16.

 

I tried to go back to this game to get through more of the story. I stopped at the part when the 3 quests open up from GIA but cannot continue as the game is making me feel queasy with all the smeary camera movement on PS4. This game is giving me bad cold sweats that the first game never did.